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Drink

Parsnip Wine

A fermented beverage made from parsnips, sugar, tartar, yeast, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and sugar work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 190 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Parsnip Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsnips

  1. Clean and quarter the parsnips.

  2. Boil the parsnips in water until tender.

  3. Drain the parsnips through a sieve without bruising them.

Ferment

  1. Pour the liquid into a tub and add sugar and crude tartar.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add yeast.

  3. Allow it to stand for four days in a warm room.

  4. When fermentation subsides, bung down the cask.

  5. Let it stand for twelve months before bottling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsnip + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together190 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Provide the main flavour and the sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast, providing the fuel that drives fermentation and produces alcohol.
Crude tartar
Adds acidity, which helps keep the wine tasting bright and stable during fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to a warm but safe temperature before the yeast goes in, or fermentation will fail.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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